It's 1996, and Jeremy Atherton Lin has met the boy of his dreams—a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit— just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights including immigration. The pair steals away to remote forests and vast deserts, London fashion shows and Berlin sex clubs, dinner parties, back alleys, East Village hotel rooms, and San Francisco dives. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in a 'city of refuge.'
A fabulously riveting hybrid memoir and queer history lesson ... If the travelogue-style Gay Bar prowls through clubs and adventures with thrill-seeking horniness, Deep House is denser and written from a quieter space of contemplation ...
The book juggles an impressive amount of material, though it can sometimes feel uneven, and the memoir passages can verge into indulgence. But that muchness is excused by what emerges to be the author’s larger project: Atherton Lin writes knowing that the history of queer people, as is the case for most marginalized groups, exists between the lines ... Backed by a formidable array of sources, he combines the rigorously researched and the deeply personal to implode that gap and fill it with as much detail as possible.
Lin writes sublimely of their early years, moving from one rundown apartment to another, learning each other’s bodies and desires, becoming part of a community. While academic tangents on anything from Prop 22 to the Chinese Exclusion Act to homosexuality in ancient Rome can be less engaging, overall, this is another gorgeously written memoir.
Lin shrewdly braids the history of gay marriage into an account of his relationship with his husband in this gorgeous follow-up to Gay Bar ... Lin seamlessly ties his own love story to a broader history of legal efforts to thwart gay love ... Stylish, sexy, and deeply moving, this blends beautiful prose and incisive social history to stunning effect.
